0019 Once again, here are the references.

0020 By 6500 B.C., the Ubaid culture has undergone one Plutonic cycle.

Plutonic cycle?

Consider the United States of America, 248 years ago (one orbit of Pluto), the United States is founded (around 1777 A.D.).

The dwarf planet of Pluto (and Charon, its moon) is discovered in the year of 1930, using a photographic technique called a blink comparator.  Once named, astrologers go back into history looking for 248-year periodicities.  They find transits corresponding, not to birth and death of social movements, but to the livingness and the corruption of civilizations.  The American Plutonic turning (1777 to 2025) may turn out to be exemplar.

In the late 1700s, the elites of America give life to an enterprise called the “American Republic”. Now, one Plutonic cycle later, the elites of America aim to bury “the American dream”.  These are not the same elites, now, as then.  The same can be said for the first complete turning of the Ubaid culture.

0021 There are no elites at the founding of the Ubaid.  By the end of the first Plutonic cycle, the elites realize that their culture has something that all the surrounding cultures do not.  What is that?  Wealth and power are the faces of labor and social specialization.

0022 The first hand-speech talking cultures exposed to the speech-alone talking Ubaids are the Hassuna, Halaf and Samarra of (less-southern or more-northern) Mesopotamia.  Perhaps, these cultures already produce artifacts of the Tepe-Gobekli type.  The figures are used for speaking to the ancestors or gods.  These figurines continue to be constructed as these Neolithic cultures expand, like rhizomes, throughout Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent.  Such are the first benefits of labor and social specialization for these folk.  Speech-alone talk facilitates invention andinnovation.

0023 Graham’s visit to the Baghdad Museum in Iraq in 2022 supports this notion.  The icons nominally date to 6000-5000 B.C. and are found in Nineveh, Iraq (corresponding to more-northern Mesopotamia).  They look like they support communing with the ancestors.

0024 The oddity, as far as figurines go, is found in the British Museum.  It is associated with the Ubaid and dates to 5200-4200 B.C., six to ten plutonic orbits after 6800 B.C., the midpoint in the sea-level rise and the nominal start of the Ubaid as a speech-alone talking culture.  This figurine has the essential features of the navel idol, but almost every feature is distorted.

0025 The difference is remarkable.

While the other navel idols are configured to support auditory hallucinations for a hand-speech talking culture (and by extension, those cultures that adopt speech-alone talk and retain their bicameral attitudes), this navel idol says, “I am an emissary of a culture practicing speech-alone talk for so long that our social institutions and organizations have undergone many transits between the overworld of creation and renewal and the underworld of depravity and corruption.  Now, we are definitely wealthier and more powerful and weirder than you, a hand-speech talking culture now exposed to the novelty of speech-alone talk.”

0026 The hands on the abdomen originally indicate that the figure will speak through auditory hallucinations (or embodied interventional sign-relations).  After all, the idol cannot move its hands.  But, it would engage in hand-speech talk, if it could.

Now, the hand-positions indicate that the figure does not engage in hand talk at all.  It represents a different living world, the world of speech-alone talk.  So, hear the emissary’s voice, interpellating you (a member of a hand-speech talking culture) to adopt these new-fangled ways.

0027 The hand-speech culture that follows the emissary’s advice will soon find itself on the path to unconstrained social complexity, just like the Ubaid before them.

0028 So, what does this mean?

After the Ubaid sends emissaries preaching the good news of our current Lebenswelt, the navel idols confound two messages.  The original message is, “Hear my voice.”  The confounding message says, “All I have is my voice.  I represent a new way, a new culture, and a new Lebenswelt.  I am an emissary of a world of labor and social specializations, of wealth and power beyond your imagination.  I am here to spread speech-alone talk.”

0029 Plus, the Ubaid emissary can teach the people about obtaining and handling copper, keeping track of the stars and planets, and so much more.